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If you are going to sell a price increase, that is not how to do it, AT&T.

Yes, wireless providers have steadily moving towards a tiered payment approach with their Internet products: go over a certain limit and, as with your cell phone bill, you can expect to pay extra. So it easy to see why broadband providers like AT&T are tempted to implement similar policies.

The company plans to start placing caps on data uses on its DLS and U-Verse services beginning in May. Consume anything over 150 GBS and the customer will pay $10 for every additional 50 GB of data. AT&T will issue warnings to the customer when he reaches the 65% threshold and then when he hits the limit.

To hear AT&T tell it, this will only apply to a small percentage of users - 2% - who use a disproportionate share of data. It didn’t exactly say data hog, but the subtext is there:

“The top 2 percent of residential subscribers uses about 20% of the bandwidth on our network,“ it said in a statement released to Engadget and other media. “Just one of these high-traffic users can utilize the same amount of data capacity as 19 typical households.”

If that doesn’t say divide and conquer to you, then consider what AT&T goes on to say: “Customers strongly believe that only those who use the most bandwidth should pay more than those who don't use as much. That's exactly what this does – and again, 98% of our customers will not be impacted by this.”

Fine. But how long will those percentages (98% of sanely-consuming Internet users versus the 2% of over eaters) stay the same? Surely not long given current trends, which is why its sales pitch for this new pricing plan is falling flat. Like the national obesity crisis and the statistics that follow it suggest, sooner or later most Americans will be in this category.

Some, pardon the ongoing pun, food for thought:

AT&T is right in pointing out that data usage is going up and up - and someone will have to pay for it. But it is making a mistake painting the over consumers as the minority - and main culprits. Hulu, YouTube, heck even Facebook are pushing consumers to online videos and movies. What price burden, if any, should they bear?

Then there is the growing trend of consumers ditching their cable and satellite television services (like U-Verse perhaps, which also offers digital TV along with Internet) opting instead to stream content over the Internet. The Internet was always all-you-could eat, why the change now consumers will begin to wonder, especially when put in this context.

Washington will ask questions, and the net neutrality wars have enough fronts open and raging.

Already Democratic Representative Edward Markey released a statement about AT&T‘s new policy. "I am concerned that charging more for increased usage would raise prices for some consumers and potentially lead to lower broadband adoption levels," he said. "This would undermine our broadband goals as outlined in the National Broadband Plan while undercutting our global competitiveness, and I will be closely monitoring this decision."